The Gossip Just Won’t Stop

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Michael Musto, right, with Andy Cohen on the set of Mr. Cohen’s “Watch What Happens Live.” Mr. Musto, formerly of The Village Voice, was a guest bartender on the show.CreditCreditTina Fineberg for The New York Times

By Mary Billard

June 5, 2013

Around 10:30 p.m. last Wednesday, 12 days after his 29-year tenure as the gossip columnist for The Village Voice was abruptly ended by the newspaper’s owner, Michael Musto was in a TriBeCa production studio, dressed in a bedazzled tuxedo jacket, getting ready for his first post-Voice job.

Mr. Musto was about to be a bartender.

But this was not just any bartending job. His ouster had been lamented by much of the New York media (“The @villagevoice firing @mikeymusto amounts to @villagevoice firing itself: auto-da-fé,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch), and the outrage had begun to open some surprising doors.

Before the show went on the air, Mr. Cohen explained how Mr. Musto, 57, ended up as the evening’s mixologist.

“When I heard what happened, I said to the booker, ‘I want him on as soon as possible,’ ” Mr. Cohen said. “He is the kind of ‘legends of New York’ we embrace.”

When the cameras rolled, Mr. Cohen wasted no time in expressing his opinion.

“I was shocked, shocked last week when The Village Voice laid off the entire reason for reading their newspaper, gossip columnist Michael Musto,” he told his audience.

“Wait. You were shocked?” asked Mr. Musto, the camera catching a look a mock surprise as the applause died down. “And first of all, I got this bartending job.”

Earlier, in the green room getting ready to go on, Mr. Musto said he was overwhelmed by the coverage of his departure (one sample, from The Daily Beast: “The Village Voice Was Crazy to Fire Him: 5 Reasons Why Michael Musto Matters”) and by the stunning end to his column, La Dolce Musto, after nearly three decades because of cutbacks at the weekly.

“It was horrifying,” he said. “That paper was my heart and soul.”

But bartending wasn’t his only offer. Mr. Musto said he was starting a weekly question-and-answer interview column for Gawker (“with a scandal celebrity or someone promoting something, or someone who has made a mark on the culture”) and a column named “Musto! The Musical!” on Out.com, the first installment of which appeared on June 3.

“The Out column will be similar to my Voice column,” he said. “A breathless romp through all the scenes that make New York tick.”

Mr. Musto also appears on “Theater Talk” on Channel 13, where he will be doing a post-mortem on the Tony Awards on Sunday. And there had been an appearance on “Smash,” an NBC series that was just canceled. “Did you see me on the last episode?” Mr. Musto asked. “I was adorable.”

Born in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, he started as a freelancer while at Columbia and never looked back.

“I’m married to my job,” he said. “I don’t even have a potted plant to take care of. It’s a roller coaster of fun, work, fun, work. I get to go to parties, to movie premieres, to fashion shows and write whatever I want.”

Mr. Musto describes himself as a cultural anthropologist, a social worker and a gossip columnist, a title that he noted was often shunned by others. La Dolce Musto’s trademark blind items became popular guessing games among Voice readers (“I used to joke that if you guessed Courtney Love, you were usually right,” he said). And, proving there is no such thing as bad publicity, nightclub denizens lobbied to be included in the “Ten Biggest Nightmares in New York.”

“I’m primarily a humorist,” he said. “I don’t have investigative skills. People read me for my take on things.”

While Mr. Musto was the first to report on a club-kid murder in the mid-1990s, as well as chronicle the sometimes delicate dance the news media did with gay celebrities who were not yet out, his forte was mapping the downtown social scene. The column put the transsexual performance artist Amanda Lepore and the party promoter Susanne Bartsch on the same level as Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.

“I wanted to champion people who made New York night life worth visiting despite the city’s best efforts to push it down,” he said.

At 11 p.m., Mr. Musto went on the set and for the next 30 minutes fulfilled his wisecracking bartending duties with aplomb. When Mr. Hawke tutored Mr. Cohen on the name of his trilogy of movies tracing a couple’s relationship (“Before Sunrise,” “Before Sunset,” “Before Midnight”), Mr. Musto toasted the actor with “Before Tequila Sunrise.”

The show over, Mr. Musto exited into the sultry night and took off the two locks anchoring his no-frills bike to a parking sign. It was midnight and he was about to head uptown to the XL Nightclub on West 42nd Street. Billy Porter, the Tony-nominated star of the Broadway musical “Kinky Boots,” was going to be there.